An Unfolding Mystery

               Over the years of family history work, I have been concerned about the marriages of my father after my mother divorced my father in 1940.  Do I have any half-sisters or brothers?  My mother mentioned to me at times that she thought the woman that my father was seeing at the time of the divorce was  Jerry Alford.  I was certain that the marriage took place in California.  I had searched for years for any additional marriage records of my father without success.

A number of years ago while living in Charbonneau, Wilsonville, Oregon, probably about 2011, my brother came up with a photo of two young girls that was given to him by our Aunt Martha.  He passed them on to me, thinking that they may be our half-sisters and prompted me to do some research on the girls.  I spent several months in research and I finally found information regarding their identity. (Unfortunately, the research data is in Bountiful, Utah and unavailable at this writing)  I sent for a birth certificate to the state of California to determine the identity of the father.  It turned out that the father was unknown to me.  I am anxious to review this research in Bountiful, my other residence, because I believe the mystery of the identity of the girls may unfold.  And, here is the reason why:

A few days ago, I opened my familysearch.org and found that my front page contained a recent photo of my brother and I as a memory under our father’s name, Royal Harvard Brooks, Sr. submitted by Donna van Uteret, my bother’s daughter.  It prompted me to review my father’s history page history page.  I was reminded that I had added the identity of his second marriage, Virginia Ann Fritz.  I’m not sure how I made that discovery, but anyway, there it was and the name was not “Alford” as my mother had thought.  The parents of Virginia Fritz had been connected by Familysearch along with many of her ancestors for several generations.  My father had a knack for finding women with well-known ancestry, as with the case of our mother.  I could not seem to leave this research and began adding familysearch noted sources to the families involved with Virginia Fritz.  As I continued to dig into the work, low and behold , I found a marriage record of my father to a Virginia Alford, May 1940 in Yuma, Arizona where his brother lived.  Her name was not jerry,  but Virginia.  This fact was verified by the 1940 US Census.  As I continued to add sources to Virginia Fritz, I came across a public record (city directory) for a Virginia Brooks, also known as Virginia Ann Fritz.  Wow!!  Virginia Fritz and Virginia Alford were one and the same person.  The birth year for both were confirmed by the 1940 census and the birth record for Virginia Fritz.  ( the photo  noted above given to my brother by our aunt, may be of Virginia and her sister, Hazel, born in 1913 and 1915 respectively)

In 1953, after graduating from college, we moved to West Riverside California, soon after which, my father came to visit me and he brought with him a baby girl of his that appeared to be about 6 months old.  He wanted me to meet my half-sister. I was so young and inexperienced in life that I did not give the visit much attention and in-fact I did not invite him into my house.  In retrospect I was very rude, and I did not ever see him again.  He died in 1978 while we were living in Egypt.  Years later, Jamie Robbins, a cousin, gave me a photo of my father with his daughter that looked to be about seven or eight years old. Her physical appearance was in the express image of our daughter, Vivian Rae.  The only name on the photo was “Margo”.  In the past, wanting to have a birth record of this child, I found only two Margo Brooks records that were born at that time in California.  I have not pursued it further to obtain the record itself.  This photo of Margo can be seen on the memory page of my father in familysearch.org.

All of the above is somehow related and connected  but, I must wait for my return to Bountiful in May of 2018.  I would love to meet my half-sister and apologize for the manner in which I treated her in 1953.  This work also shows the power of the Holy Ghost and the spirit of Elijah in bringing the gift of our Redeemer, baptism for the remission of their sins, so that they may be released from that spirit prison where no progress can be made.
(see my blog "A Past Moment in Time Becomes History" 8/7/2012)